SAN DIEGO – If there was one thing the Nationals could cling to as evidence of improvement from Patrick Corbin this season, it was the fact he has almost always pitched well enough to give his team a chance.
That’s admittedly a low bar for acceptable pitching performances. But the Nats had no choice but to set the bar low with Corbin, given his immense struggles the last three seasons. If he was at least doing enough to give them a chance to win, that would have to be considered a success, right?
What, then, to make of Corbin’s performance tonight, in which the left-hander most certainly did not give his team a chance during a 13-3 blowout loss to the Padres?
A six-run bottom of the fifth foiled whatever possibility remained for Corbin to leave the mound with the Nationals in a reasonable position. That frame included every manner of calamity, some of them not the left-hander’s fault but plenty of them still falling on his shoulders.
A four-run bottom of the seventh off Chad Kuhl, now the owner of an 8.45 ERA, didn’t help matters. Nor did the two-run homer Thaddeus Ward surrender to Juan Soto (who reached base four times in five plate appearances) in the eighth.
And don’t forget another feeble showing from the Nats lineup, all of it leading to the team’s 15th loss in its last 18 games, its worst prolonged stretch since a 2-16 mark last July.
"That's tough. We'd like to keep it close, see if our offense can get going," manager Davey Martinez said. "It just got out of hand there. You're talking about a (Padres) team that's built to hit the ball throughout that lineup."
A good number of games during this agonizing month have been there for the taking, especially late. This one wasn’t, slipping out of control during the aforementioned bottom of the fifth.
Corbin had managed to hang in there to that point. He served up a leadoff homer to Ha-Seong Kim in the bottom of the first but prevented anything else after that despite allowing three more hits and a walk.
Not that his teammates took advantage, failing to score in their first five innings against Padres right-hander Joe Musgrove, going 0-for-3 with runners in scoring position.
"We tried to be aggressive on the fastballs," Martinez said. "We just missed a couple. Then when he was getting his breaking balls over, we started chasing a little bit, and it was tough."
The fateful fifth opened in innocuous fashion, with Jake Cronenworth reaching on an infield single. After Corbin struck out former teammate Nelson Cruz, his 1-1 sinker grazed Trent Grisham on the arm, giving him a free base.
That’s when it all unraveled. Kim, squaring around to bunt, had to dive out of the way of another inside pitch, which deflected off Keibert Ruiz’s mitt and rolled to the backstop for a costly passed ball on the young catcher. Moments later, with two men now in scoring position, Kim lined Corbin’s next pitch to center for a two-run single.
"I didn't see the ball," Ruiz said of the bunt-attempt-turned-passed ball. "(Kim) just covered home plate. I didn't see the ball."
Back-to-back walks of Fernando Tatis Jr. and Soto loaded the bases for Manny Machado, who brought home a run on a chopper up the middle fielded and flipped by Luis García to CJ Abrams for a force out. One more quality pitch from Corbin at least would’ve kept the deficit at 4-0 and kept his team within spitting distance. But when he left a changeup over the plate to Xander Bogaerts and watched the ball soar into the left-field bleachers, that was the end of that.
"I felt really good up to that point," he said. "They just got a couple guys on, and you make a mistake to pretty much anybody in this lineup, they can hit it out. Just an inning that seemed like it couldn't end."
It did finally end, though not until Corbin had been charged with six runs that frame, a season-high seven runs overall. His record is now 4-9, his ERA is now 5.32. Both represent modest improvement from 2022.
Which underscores just how low the bar has been set.